L’EnfantPeuple: Rimbaud,Vallès,LiteraryPolitics,andtheLegacyoftheCommune = = ATHESISSUBMITTEDTOTHEFACULTYOFTHEGRADUATESCHOOLOF THEUNIVERSITYOFMINNESOTA = BY = RobertA.St.Clair = = = INPARTIALFULFILLMENTOFTHEREQUIREMENTS FORTHEDEGREEOF DOCTOROFPHILOSOPHY = = MáriaMinichBrewer,Advisor BrunoChaouat,CoAdvisor = June2011 Copyright © Robert A. St. Clair, 2011 i Acknowledgements As no order could ever adequately express the importance of their contributions or the extent of my gratitude for their collaboration and support, the following friends, mentors, and family are listed here in no particular order at all. My parents, for making sure I went to college and not out west in a box-car, as initially planned (there are of course more things to thank them for than there are footnotes in the present work, but I’d like to single out this one in the hopes that it will bring a smile to their faces). Judith Preckshot, for her tireless and assiduous efforts when she was the DGS in 2006 to help make sure my dossier d’admission to the University of Minnesota’s French Department was a successful one. I’d like to recognize Judith Preckshot and Eileen Sivert, too, for helping me prepare for the job market by giving me a chance to teach the 3101 course – it was a thrill from start to finish, one that provided invaluable professional experience to a young academic, and the even greater privilege of sharing my work on Rimbaud with the students at the University of Minnesota. Thanks to Dan Brewer for reading a very early version of the work on David’s Bara that figures in chapter 2, and to Dana Lindaman for inviting me to Harvard in the spring of 2010 to share my work on Rimbaud with his poetry class – it proved to be a trip that was both delightful and immensely productive (extra thanks for sharing Charles Marville’s photos of pre-Haussmann Paris). To the Department of French and Italian at the University of Minnesota for the intellectual, professional, and financial assistance I have benefitted from over the past five years. I would also like to recognize Armand Renaud, whose enlightened and generous gift to the French Department allowed me to attend the Dartmouth Institute in the summer of 2007, and Hella Mears and the Center for German and European Studies, whose material support allowed me to spend a very productive summer drafting up the third chapter of this work, as well as an essay and a presentation that may have, if indirectly, helped me earn a job. My thanks, too, to the College of Liberal Arts for their generous support over the 2009-2010 academic year. Their Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship allowed me to write a dissertation that was not only coherent, but manage (I think to everyone’s relief) to write in fewer than 1000 pages. Many sincere thanks to Seth Whidden for his intellectual generosity and spontaneous encouragement. ii Special thanks to Steve Jaksa for his intellectual companionship and inimitable friendship over more years than I care to count, and whose continued presence never fails to remind me that there are simply some things in life that “enjambent l’absence,” as René Char once put it. In a similar vein, my thanks to Christian Haines for the delightful and always provocative Wednesday night conversations at the Leaning Tower of Pizza – an improbable (or improbably utopic) place if ever there was one to begin, as the line goes, a beautiful friendship. To the committee of this dissertation, for their unfailing intellectual, academic, and material support, I acknowledge a debt approaching the unfathomable. Eileen Sivert’s sense of humor and humanity, her familiarity with the 19th-century canon, and her willingness to work outside of class on an independent study (that subsequently informed the conclusion of the present work) when I know for a fact that she was far too busy to do so speaks to her inspiring commitment to her students and to French literature. John Mowitt taught me how to read critical theory in his seminars on socio-criticism and semiotics and, indeed, a passing glance at this work’s bibliography would suffice to give the reader a sense of the importance this generous scholar has had on my writing, thinking, and reading. Indeed, the pieces on David’s Bara and the idea for the chapter on Rimbaud’s “Le Dormeur du Val” came from the stimulating conversations I’ve had with him over the years, in class and out. It is thanks to Christophe Wall-Romana that I even had the courage to write a dissertation in part on Arthur Rimbaud. He was the first professor I had the extreme good fortune to talk with when I arrived at the University of Minnesota. When I told him I wanted to work on Rimbaud and the Commune, Christophe smiled, gave me a pile of books that, when stacked in my arms, surpassed my head (an appropriate metaphor, as it turns out), and said, “We’ll have some reading to do, then.” It was only years later, when an “important scholar” from a French department that shall remain nameless breathlessly opined “Oh, Rimbaud, there’s really nothing more to say about him,” that I realized how profoundly ethical Christophe’s gesture of academic encouragement was. The only adequate way of thanking him for encouraging me to not only puzzle over the authors I’ve read for this work, but to firmly believe in the merit and fecundity of that puzzlement is to hope one day to do the same for a student in turn. Bruno Chaouat’s enthusiastic commitment to this project, often responding to drafts sent iii out within a matter of hours, and with more perspicuous and provocative comments than I knew what to do with, to say nothing of his rigorously unfailing attention to the smallest detail in any text or argument, and amiably unflappable encouragement has made the process of writing this dissertation an enjoyable one. His ceaseless dedication, immense erudition and ineffable generosity have been invaluable and inspiring from start to last. Last, but by no means least, I’d like to thank Mária Brewer. Mária’s was the first seminar I took at the University of Minnesota. Out of her class, came a project on Vallès, the beginnings of a reflection on the Commune, and an idea for thinking about the figure of the child and alterity in 19th-century French literature. In sum, without realizing it, I began writing this dissertation in Mária Brewer’s graduate seminar on Childhood as a Site of Modernity in the fall of 2006. A project can clearly change immensely from the moment one imagines it to the moment it is “out-there” in a finished form. I’d like to thank Mária Brewer, then, for her impeccable mentorship and advising, and for supporting my project when it was no doubt abundantly clear that I didn’t have the slightest idea where I was going with it. Mária was always there in such moments, an utterly invaluable and stalwartly patient counterpart to my own nervous personality, to remind me that I was up to the task, and that, in any event, the committee had my back. For that, as well as for her exceptional collaboration, the invitations to come to her undergraduate class to talk about Rimbaud (the points of departure for the first and second chapters of this dissertation), her countless letters of recommendation, and her judicious direction and advice over the years, I owe her a deep debt of gratitude. Finally, I’d like to thank my wife, Sophie, and our son, Arthur Jules Thomas. I dedicate this work to them both: to her, for putting up with a thésard with a strangely infinite patience that must be love or madness, and to him in the hopes that his life shall be long, happy, and agitée. R.A.S. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements i-iii Table of Contents iv-v Introduction 1-26 I. History, Hermeneutics, Poetics: A Word on Methodology – II. On the Infans and the Demos: Representations of Difference in 19th-Century French Discourse – III. Structure of the Present Work Chapter 1: In Democracy’s Green Cabaret 27-120 I. Situating the Texts – II. What is a Cabaret? – III. A propos of Nothing: Rimbaud and the Evidence of the Common – IV. How to Make Poor Use of an Alexandrine –V. L’Adorable, or Beauty Decanonized – VI. Nina, or: Don’t Forget to Laugh – Conclusion Chapter 2: An Exquisite Cadaver: “Le Dormeur du Val,” 121-229 Between a (Body)Politics of Community and an Aesthetics of Absence Introduction – I. Epigraph: The Deaths of Joseph Bara – II. The Infinite Nude and the Naked Truth of the Revolution – III. The Envious Destiny of Joseph Bara, Puer Novo of the Revolution – IV. Some Hermeneutical Problems in “Le Dormeur du Val” – V. Context: Rimbaud and the Sonnet in 1870 – VI. A Brief Genealogy of Some Hermeneutical Tendencies – VII. What’s so “Tranquille” about the “Dormeur”? – VIII. Archaeologies of the Dormeur: On the Historical Context – IX. Canons and Cannons: Is the “Dormeur” a Founding Text of the Nation-State? – X. A (Very Brief) Genealogy of Trauma as a Psychoanalytic Problem – XI. Repetitions – XII. Absence, or: Why You Don’t Have to Stumble Upon a Dead Body to Write a Sonnet about One – XIII. L’Homme, cette nuit: The Sleeper’s Strange Use of Time – XIV. Post-Traumatic Sonnet Syndrome – XV. Conclusions. Christ Asleep in the Valley, or: in what Sense is the Dormeur a Christic Figure ? Chapter 3: The Infantile Community: 230-346 Writing Resistance and Memory in the Aftermath of the Commune I. The Book of Laughter and Remembering – II. Lex Oblivionis, or: Don’t Forget to Remember to Forget – III.